This split on detente highlights Kennedy’s mixed legacy to Johnson. Kennedy’s crises gave Johnson breathing space. As leaders, Kennedy and Khrushchev were both highly competitive while entertaining exaggerated hopes and fears. This volatile mix had brought the world close to nuclear war. Faced with apocalypse, Washington and Moscow had accepted common-sense mitigation of the underlying problems. The Berlin Wall ended the hemorrhage of East Germans while allowing West Berliners their freedom and ties with the outside world. The Cuban crisis subsided with the missiles withdrawn and the Americans promising not to invade the island unless provoked. This easing of the issues that had preoccupied Americans and the Soviets in 1958-62 enabled the Johnson administration to pursue detente, especially in 1966-68. Happily, there was no serious Soviet-American confrontation during LBJ’s term. Unhappily, the retreat from Armageddon enabled Johnson to focus his foreign policy on a disastrous project, the Vietnam War. Kennedy had deepened the US commitment to South Vietnam. Despite his rhetoric and activism, Kennedy did not solve but rather passed on to Johnson structural problems he had inherited from Eisenhower. The balance-of-payments deficit and gold drain continued. With Germany’s division dramatized by the Berlin Wall, the FRG remained frustrated. The problem of containing West German nuclear aspirations persisted. France defied US leadership, and Britain continued its quest for a post-imperial economic and political role. The Alliance for Progress did little to ease Latin American stagnation, inequality, and frustration. Non-aligned nations in Africa and Asia remained volatile and resistant to blandishments from East and West.
In terms of personality, Kennedy and Johnson presented a mix of similarities and contrasts. Although Johnson’s family did not approach Kennedy’s family in wealth or eminence, both produced intensely competitive sons bent on redressing grievances over status. While Kennedy vaulted the barriers imposed on nouveau-riche Irish-Americans, Johnson outgrew the limitations of his central Texas upbringing. During the late 1930s, when JFK was being escorted around Europe by William C. Bullitt, George F. Kennan, and other diplomats, LBJ gained entry into Roosevelt’s circle of congressmen. Roosevelt admired this intelligent, hard-working acolyte and recruited him to run for senator after only four years in Congress. Johnson’s roots among hardscrabble farmers and his close association with Roosevelt imprinted him with a fierce commitment to domestic reform that Kennedy never matched. Differences in background also conditioned their approaches to personal diplomacy. Comfortable with a wide range of people, Kennedy could turn on the charismatic charm. In his short presidency he met with many foreign chiefs, including twenty-eight African leaders invited to the White House. In contrast, Johnson kept foreign trips and visitors to a minimum. The problem with foreigners, LBJ explained, "is that they’re not like the folks you were reared with."186
Johnson shared Kennedy’s tendency to personalize foreign-policy contests. Tragically, however, Johnson never gained the confident perspective and release that Kennedy won from his perceived victory in the Cuban missile crisis. Instead, Johnson waded deeper into the morass of Vietnam. Haunting him were fears that if one showed cowardice, enemies would breach the most private refuge. "What in the hell is Vietnam worth to me?" Johnson asked in 1964. Then he answered himself: "Of course, if you start running from the Communists, they may chase you right into your own kitchen."187 He had learned early in life that if you ran from a bully, "he is going to wind up chasing you right out of your own house."188 Explaining to Martin Luther King, Jr., his February 1965 decision to bomb North Vietnam, Johnson alluded to unspecified demons invading not just his home but also his inner self. He said he preferred not to escalate the war. "But they kept coming. They just kept coming and I couldn’t stand it any longer."189 George Reedy, a close associate, recalled of Johnson, "whatever may be said about him, he was a tormented man. I don’t know what tormented him."190 The president was certainly cognizant of the supposed strategic rationale for fighting in Vietnam. Nevertheless, he couched the consequences of pulling out in personal terms: "They’d impeach a president that would run."191 He feared that the American people will "forgive you for anything except being weak."42
Johnson coupled his personal and political determination to stave off foreign-policy threats with faith in the righteousness of America’s mission to remake the world. As he put it: "Woodrow Wilson once said: 'I hope we shall
7. The war in Vietnam became President Johnson's worst nightmare; here the president is reacting to news about the war from Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in December 1964.
Never forget that we created this nation, not to serve ourselves, but to serve mankind.’”192 In early 1965, Johnson invoked Wilsonian ideology to justify his plans for two simultaneous initiatives, an expanded war overseas and a Great Society reform program at home. He believed that domestic and foreign affairs remained inseparable: "The state of the Union depends, in large measure, upon the state of the world."193 When protesters later criticized the war, Johnson countered that the United States risked "decay and even disaster" if it looked "only through a narrow glass." Johnson believed that America could fulfill the promise of economic opportunity and civil rights at home only if it was expanding those promises abroad. He warned that a United States 'living in a hostile or despairing world would be neither safe nor free to build a civilization to liberate the spirit of man."194
The outline for detente with Moscow that Johnson inherited was only partly fleshed out during his presidency. Two weeks after taking office, Johnson both began and ended a meeting by reiterating a first principle: "A nuclear war will be the death of all of our hopes and it is our task to see that it does not happen."195 Johnson and his advisers did not, however, believe that nuclear war threatened. This confidence enabled them to put other priorities ahead of improved relations with Moscow. Johnson wanted to ensure his victory in the November 1964 election as someone “tough" on Communism. He also sought to defeat the NLF and North Vietnam. Although cognizant of the Soviets’ worries about a remilitarized West Germany, he preferred to co-opt rather than frustrate that vibrant nation. Johnson remained suspicious of the Soviets and even more so of the Chinese. Khrushchev and his successors, more eager for a breakthrough, reached out to the new president. The Kremlin chiefs sent detailed letters after Johnson became president and again after his election victory. Johnson responded less effusively. He did not meet with the Soviet ambassador until four months after he became president and he delayed two months before replying to the Kremlin’s post-election proposals. Sidetracking the Soviets’ suggestion for solidifying the division of Germany, which would infuriate the FRG, Johnson knitted what Rusk called “the little threads that bind."196 These were noncontroversial, bilateral agreements that fostered trust, such as an accord on rescuing astronauts.
Johnson and his advisers dealt with Cold War adversaries along three tracks. They sought to isolate “Red China," minimize disputes with Moscow, and quash Hanoi’s will to fight. The contradictions in this policy became apparent in February 1965, when Johnson chose to bomb North Vietnam even though Premier Aleksei Kosygin (who had helped overthrow Khrushchev in October 1964) was just then visiting Hanoi. LBJ explained that he “wanted to impress Kosygin and a number of others in the world."197 While Johnson may have “impressed" Kosygin with US military power, he failed to win Soviet aid in pressing North Vietnam and the NLF to give up their fight. Though unwilling to pay a high price for detente with the Soviets, Johnson hoped to move in that direction. In his January 1967 state of the union message, he declared: “Our objective is not to continue the cold war but to end it." Eschewing the verbal barrage that extended back to the Truman Doctrine speech, LBJ pledged to avoid “both the acts and the rhetoric of the cold war."198 He called for “bridge-building" to Poland, Romania, and other Soviet satellites eager to trade and establish cultural ties with the West.
The shifting nuclear balance propelled Johnson toward detente. Kennedy had deployed preponderant military power to persuade the Soviets to back down in the missile crisis. Yet this superiority proved fleeting. Afterward, a Moscow official warned an American, "you’ll never be able to do that to us again."199 In the ensuing decade, the Soviets, despite a slowing economy, secured nuclear parity and built a blue-water navy. Johnson sought agreement with Moscow to head off a race in anti-ballistic missiles, which could destabilize the deterrence of "mutual assured destruction." After his June 1967 summit with Kosygin in Glassboro, New Jersey, Johnson boasted of their agreements. The accords regulated consular affairs and commercial air travel and banned weapons in outer space. Always competitive, Johnson contrasted this comity with Kennedy’s calamities: "We have made some progress since Vienna, the Berlin Wall, and the Cuban missile crisis."200 In August 1968, however, Soviet tanks crushed prospects for an anti-ballistic missile accord when they rolled into Czechoslovakia to put down the reformist "Prague Spring."201 After a few months, Johnson resumed negotiations in hope of achieving a missile agreement before he had to relinquish the presidency. In this instance, too, Johnson overestimated his opportunity.
Johnson could move toward detente in part because the German issue was stabilizing. "I know my Germans," Johnson liked to say, having grown up with a German grandmother near German settlements in the Texas hill country. He determined to keep the Germans in Europe "by my side where I can count on them and where I can watch them." He acknowledged that his "overwhelming interest was to make sure that the Germans did not get us into World War III."202 Since the late 1940s, Americans and their European allies had kept the West Germans contained and busy by integrating them into supranational economic and military structures, such as the European Coal and Steel Community, the Common Market, and NATO. Americans valued the MLF scheme, despite its farcical aspects, because it promised to apply the supranational formula to the hypersensitive issue of a possible German nuclear bomb. In an elaborate dance fTom 1963-66, the Americans and the allies tiptoed around the fact that the MLF remained, despite the camouflage, a ruse. The scheme was not substantive enough to give West Germany a real voice in the decision to use nuclear weapons. Yet it contained enough substance to scare the Russians. The French, who had their own bomb, vehemently opposed the plan since it threatened their superior status. Finally, Johnson’s advisers and their FRG counterparts opted for a "non-hardware" solution. McNamara’s Defense Department agreed to admit German and other NATO defense officials into the technical process of nuclear warplanning.
Meanwhile, the mood in the FRG was changing. The Berlin Wall underscored that reunification was unlikely to be achieved through ritual pledges made by Americans and others to placate their German allies. Foreign Minister and later Chancellor Willy Brandt began reaching out to the East Germans, Soviets, Poles, and others with a policy that became known as Ostpolitik. As part of these policies, the FRG accepted the 1968 Nuclear NonProliferation Treaty negotiated by the Americans and Soviets.
World History
